Culture

There are two sentences – or beginnings of sentences, anyway – in Julian Novitz’s psychological thriller Little Sister that encapsulate everything this novel is about. The first, “To live is to battle with trollfolk”, from Henrik Ibsen, is quoted by the alarmingly volatile teenager Shane. The second sentence, “Something happened”, is in Shane’s own voice, and it kicks off the whole book. Little Sister unpacks exactly what happened, why, and how this central, bloody event affected everyone else. And as it turns out, this event (to summarise: moody teenager with saviour complex + sharp sword = not a good time) is all about the “battle with trollfolk”: the battle with the darkest, most twisted depths of the human soul.

It’s a big theme to bite off and chew, but Novitz generally handles it well. This kind of book revolves around questions (What the hell did Shane do? Why? What exactly did his girlfriend Eileen tell him? How is their high school English teacher Mr N involved in this? And what the bloody hell is going on with his little sister?) and for the most part Novitz answers them well, while maintaining dramatic tension. The best moments of the novel, like the section told in the voice of Eileen, generate a building ZOMG-WTFness that make you keep reading, cos goshdarnit you’ve got to know what happens next. The section told in the voice of Eileen is particularly good in this regard. It helps that every character is fully and convincingly realised, and subject to their own realistic agendas and predispositions, making the book even more engaging.

It’s a shame, then, that there are more than a few major inconcistencies in the narrative that jolt the reader out of the world of the book and back to reality. For instance, what’s with all the Americanisms? Even though this book is set in New Zealand and Australia, and is about Kiwi characters, for some reason we’ve got high school students writing “book reports” (don’t we do “essays”?) and high school teachers talking about students’ GPAs (last time I checked, New Zealand high schools don’t calculate GPAs). There are also times when characters don’t speak in a distinct voice, even though they always act in a distinctive way. For instance, it’s completely understandable that Shane would buy a samurai sword, but to my mind it doesn’t make sense that the same 18-year-old high school boy would use the word “melancholy” in a sentence. Even most 20-year-old Arts students would only do that ironically. The book also suffers from what I call “the OoTP problem”, which is when a book is named after something or someone that ends up feeling weirdly tangential to the actual plot of the book (see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). In the same way, the “little sister” of the title, though tantalisingly mentioned throughout, only actually shows up halfway through, and the final revelation concerning her is pretty obvious and so becomes anticlimactic. Speaking of anticlimactic, there’s also one hilarious/awkward sex scene, which, unfortunately, I’m not sure is supposed to be hilarious or awkward. Case in point: there are references to Eileen’s “small, tender mound of intimate flesh”, and how “her wet thighs rub[bed] faster and faster as her interior self-contracted around me”. Mmm. Sexy.

I suspect these slips were so disappointing to me partly because the rest of the book was pretty satisfying. The characters are compelling, and apart from one twist you can see a mile off, it’ll keep you turning the pages pretty much all the way through. It would be a great summer read if it weren’t for all that murder.